Huawei: ‘We could have made the Ascend P6 even thinner’

Despite boasting the title of the world’s slimmest smartphone, the Huawei Ascend P6 could have been made even skinner, the handset’s manufacturer has suggested.

Formally unveiled at a special UK based launch event yesterday, the Huawei Ascend P6 measures in at a seemingly impossible 6.18mm thick, but the Chinese manufacturer has suggested it could have made the device even slimmer.

However, despite suggesting that they “could have made the P6 thinner,” Huawei’s design heads have claimed that doing so would have taken away from the handset’s high-end finish.

“There are a lot of things we could have done to make it thinner that we pulled back from because of build quality,” Nick Woodley, Head of ID Design at Huawei’s London design offices said in an exclusive interview with TrustedReviews. He added: “There is always that balance and ‘what is the thinnest phone we could make’ is just one statement we had to address.”

A notable step up from the design of past Huawei branded handsets, the newly announced Huawei Ascend P6 features a sleek, metal construction that is a mere 120g in weight and which plays host to a 4.7-inch 720p HD display. The P6 looks somewhat similar to an iPhone 5, sharing more than a few slight design similarities with the Apple branded device.

“The move to the metal chassis is all about perceived quality,” Woodley told us. “We wanted to produce the thinnest phone that actually feels solid, that is durable and feels like precision and high quality as opposed to just going for the thinnest thing possible.”

Claiming that the decision to adopt a premium metal finish was one element which added precious fractions of millimetres to the P6’s design, he added: “If you are trying to produce a device of this size (4.7-inches) you need the strength of metal. We could have made the P6 out of plastic, and we could have made it thinner if we had used plastic, but then you wouldn’t have tangible product, it would creak and it would bend.”

A handset which treads the line between mid-range leader and high-end wannabe, the Huawei Ascend P6 specs sheet sees the handset’s stunningly streamlined construction paired with a 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM and an 8-megapixel rear-mounted camera. A second, 5-megapixel snapper also lines up around front.

While it might fall slightly short of the current market leaders on a features front, the Huawei Ascend P6 is 1.7mm slimmer than the Samsung Galaxy S4, a full 3.1mm more streamlined that the HTC One and even 1.4mm narrower than Apple’s latest flagship phone.